Sunday 7/2/06Jerusalem (Hadassah and Yad V’Shem) and the Dead Sea – Day 7

Sunday morning, first we went to Hadassah hospital to see the Chagall windows.  They are amazing.  We all noted that the “Benjamin” window has a wolf in it in the lower left corner. 

  

There’s a mall in the Hospital and we stopped in the bookstore on the way out and bought Harry Potter (1 and 6) in Hebrew.  Next we went to Yad V'shem.  Yad V’shem is amazing.  We were there for 2 – 3 hours and we would have needed ten times that much to see it all.  The memorial to the 1.5 million children who died is incredibly moving.  They honor the righteous non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews by planting a forest of trees with a plaque with a name by each tree.  There’s a hall where the names of the camps are remembered.  They have a place where they have stored memories of people who lived through the Holocaust.  There is also a museum that presents the history of events that led up to the Holocaust and also the Holocaust itself.  Ant there is a bunch more that we didn’t get a chance to see.  The museum was restricted to people age 10 and older, so we told Benjamin to say he is 10.  I wondered if we were making a mistake by doing that, but neither Marc nor I wanted to miss the museum.  It turned out not to be a problem because we ran out of time and went very quickly through the concentration camp / gas chamber part of the timeline.

  

We had lunch at the cafeteria at Yad V’Shem.  Marc and Jonathan shared breaded fish (and rice and potatoes and salad) and Benjamin and I shared grilled fish in wine sauce (and rice and potatoes and salad) It was very yummy.

 

Then on to the Dead Sea.  We stopped at Ahava, a cosmetics factory, which was a waste for our family, but lots of people on the tour bought lotions.  The picture on the left is the assembly line at the factory.  The picture on the right is the Dead Sea.

 

We arrived at the Dead Sea around 5:30.  First problem – The boys’ room only had 2 beds.  I couldn’t get anyone on the phone, so I went down to the desk.  The hotel staff brought a bed and left it in the hallway.  The boys dragged it into their room.  We changed into swimsuits and went to the Dead Sea.  The Dead Sea is wonderful.  So warm, and you float like you are filled with air.  Benjamin got salt water in his eyes, but we flushed them with fresh water and he was fine – he even went back in again.

 

We came in and showered and Marc asked the hotel staff to make up Benjamin’s bed.  Dinner was an amazing buffet at the hotel.  After dinner, I went to put the kids to bed and found Benjamin’s bed was still not made up.  Since we were planning on getting up early to climb Masada, and wanted the boys to go to bed, this was somewhat of a problem.  I called housekeeping and asked them to make it up.  The boys changed, but after 15 – 20 minutes, Benjamin’s bed was still not made, so I called again.  Finally, someone came at about 9:15 and the boys were able to go to bed.  We crashed too.

 

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